"Shambling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hunting; but greater contrast could not have been found than between his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the profound salutations of the assemblage, his eye rolled round them until it alighted on Richard Assheton, and, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... my three men were heavy. The lean fellow—I have christened him Shanks, a long, shambling human bag of bones—moved about painfully in a listless sort of way, betokening severe rheumatics; his joints needed oil. Four or five huge basins of steaming rice and the customary amount of reboiled ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... at first called themselves—who owned all this, were a somewhat unusual family to find in such an old-fashioned part of the country. Parson Tringham had spoken truly when he said that our shambling John Durbeyfield was the only really lineal representative of the old d'Urberville family existing in the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew very well, that the Stoke-d'Urbervilles were no more d'Urbervilles of the true tree then he was himself. Yet it must ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the three in the cabin were playing cards and Tom was preparing lunch, Jarrow came shambling aft, and without a word went over the side and into the long boat. When Trask went out on deck the captain was pulling slowly for the shore, making a course to land near where Dinshaw was toiling in the broiling sun at his ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... stand on the far shore and whistle for Rorie with the boat. I had no need to repeat the signal. At the first sound, Mary was at the door flying a handkerchief by way of answer, and the old long-legged serving-man was shambling down the gravel to the pier. For all his hurry, it took him a long while to pull across the bay; and I observed him several times to pause, go into the stern, and look over curiously into the wake. As he came nearer, he seemed to me aged and haggard, and I thought ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... came back no reply. The hoofs ahead seemed to quicken into a shambling trot, that was all. And after a little he heard them ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... square of pavement, keeping close to the dark wall and avoiding the streak of light that fell on the flagstones from a window in the opposite house. Seen from that height he was of course fore-shortened and probably looked more shambling and decrepit than he was. He picked his way along with exaggerated care and looked like a silly old cat crossing a wet street. When he reached the gate that led into an alley way between two buildings, he felt ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... coats, dyed hair, servants' feet, and a dozen and one other subjects, quite other than the superphysical, successively occupied my thoughts. Imagine, then, my surprise and the shock I received, when, on glancing at the gravel in front of me, I saw two shadows—two enigmatical shadows. A dog came shambling along the path, showed its teeth, snarled, sprang on one side, and, with bristling hair, fled for its life. I examined the plot of ground behind me; there was nothing that could in any way account for the shadows, nothing like them. Something rubbed against ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... the sound a creature came shambling forward, carrying what looked like a huge melon in either hand. Jim recognized ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... at a bare table. Another seated at the window, his chair tipped back, his feet on the sill, a pipe between his teeth. Buzz, shambling, suddenly ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... to cross the station by the under-ground passage and wait twenty minutes for a squalid, shambling local train which took them to Shawport, at the foot of the rise ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... and of short unstressed vowels separated by a liquid consonant, in such words, for instance, as "dissolute," or "amorous." By a variety of small observances, which, when fully stated, make up a formidable code, he mended the shambling gait of the loose dramatic blank verse, and made of it a worthy ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... days of actual warfare were over we had completely forgotten those little tents that we had practised pitching so carefully, and that we had meant to sleep in at night. Little, dirty, unkempt, broken-hearted men came shuffling in the dust of the road by day, shambling along the road at night. Thousands of them passed. No sound, save the fall of footsteps. No contrast, save where a huddle of refugees passed, their children beside them, their household goods, or ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... through which the German prisoners were being led, I hurriedly fixed my camera and filmed them shambling in, holding their hands up, their nerves completely shattered by the intensity of our terrific bombardment. Some were covered with wounds, others were carrying our wounded Tommies in on stretchers. It was an extraordinary sight. Ten minutes before these men were doing ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... yet held its ancient creatures— the swift and graceful deer, the soft-footed panther, the shambling black bear, the wild hog, the wolf, all manner of furred creatures, great store of noble wild fowl—all these thriving after the fecund fashion of this brooding land. It was a kingdom, this wild world, a realm in the wilderness; a kingdom fit ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... polish the tusks, there was no jealousy: only a solemn sense that Mr. Wilson had been greatly favored. Brad's wife sewed together a dark slate-colored cambric, for the elephant's hide, and wet and wrinkled it, as her husband bade her, for the shambling shoulders and flanks. It was she who made the ears, from a pattern cunningly conceived; and she stuffed the legs with fine shavings brought from the planing-mill at Sudleigh. Then there came an intoxicating day when the trunk took ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... room that moment to lay the luncheon, she proposed a turn in the garden, and fetched Mr. Trinder's hat herself, and guided him to a side-walk, where they could not be seen from the drawing-room windows. Nan followed them, and tried to keep step with Mr. Trinder's shambling footsteps, as he walked between the girls with a hot perplexed face, and still ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... descending the hill, he got on his horse and swam the stream. It carried him below, but he was waiting for them when they reached the level. He was tall, shambling, and bony, and roved over them with a pleasant, ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... ascertaining their attention to his interests. Ware was one of his most trusted lieutenants, however, and everything that he had ever seen or heard satisfied him of the man's faithfulness. So he made haste to relieve him from embarrassment, for the tall, awkward, shambling fellow ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... street, certain forms he did meet, But scarce might behold their faces; From matted elf-locks eyes stared like an ox, And shambling were their paces! ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to Hartford, shortly afterward, Bok was just turning into Forrest Street when a little old woman came shambling along toward him, unconscious, apparently, of people or surroundings. In her hand she carried a small tree-switch. Bok did not notice her until just as he had passed her he heard her calling to him: "Young man, young man." Bok retraced his steps, and then the old lady said: "Young man, you have ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... torn down to give place to the new structure. When a boy I had often been in the old shop, and have heard the founder, Bishop Allen, preach in the wooden building. He was much reverenced. I remember his appearance, and his feeble, shambling gait as he approached the close of an ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... corrugated iron and boards an inch thick intervened between us and the noisy tramplings of the rain and heat of the sun. The only room accommodated some primitive furniture, a bed being the denominating as well as the essential feature. A little shambling structure of rough slabs and iron walls contrived a double debt ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... hour, in the heat of the day or the cool of the evening, the giant Mexican strode on by the side of the two horsemen, sometimes trotting like a dog, more often walking with a shambling, wide-reaching step, tireless as any wild animal. His feet, seamed and parched into the semblance rather of horn than of flesh and bone, were quite bare, though now it was a time of year when the nights at least were very cool and when freezing weather might ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... in a sort of terror, the tall figure as it was assisted from the kuruma and led, shambling, through the house. The three moved on to the wing containing Ume's chamber, and the painting room. Mata heard the fusuma close gently, the nurse's voice give admonition to "keep his spirit strong for this ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... but she made haste to call Cyrus, who came shambling along the hall from the cabin. The parlor was dark, for though it was a day of sunshine and merry May wind, Gussie kept the shutters bowed—but Cyrus could see the pale intensity of his visitor's face. There was a moment's silence, ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... honest pedagogue, for such his dress bespoke him. A long, lean, shambling, stooping figure was surmounted by a head thatched with lank, black hair somewhat inclining to grey. His features had the cast of habitual authority, which I suppose Dionysius carried with him from the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... did not fly, but sat gravely on the log in front of Uncle Jim's hotel, and waited for the creaking, stage, white with far-gathered dust, to climb the last pitch of the road up from the arroyo and come on with the shambling trot of a pair of tired mules for the final nourish at the end of the ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... along the quay in silence, and had nearly reached the end of it, when the figure of a man turned the corner of the houses and advanced at a shambling trot ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... the little cavalcade, with Cricket driving, because she was the smallest, and could perch up on the others' knees, while old Billy, all beam, jogged after, making almost as good time, with his long legs and shambling gait, as ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... mumbled the captain, meekly shambling toward the table, and, in his anxiety to give no cause for unpleasantness, beginning to empty ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... sly-looking, houses wicked-looking, houses pompous-looking. Heaven bless us! what a rakish pump! what a self-important town-hall! what a hard-hearted prison! The dead walls are covered with advertisements of Mr. Sleary's circus. Newman Noggs comes shambling along. Mr. and the Misses Pecksniff come sailing down the sunny side of the street. Miss Mercy's parasol is gay; papa's neck-cloth is white, and terribly starched. Dick Swiveller leans against a wall, his hands in his pockets, a primrose held between his teeth, contemplating ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive coloring, what gilding and enameling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch,—a mere enameled vessel of dishonor! Let the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... weaned from his traditionary pursuits and transferred to what some economists call the productive section of society. The experiment has failed, and the cause of the failure is not difficult to find. One has merely to look at these men of gaunt visage and shambling gait, with their loop-holed slippers, and black, threadbare coats reaching down to their ankles, to understand that they are not in their proper sphere. Their houses are in a most dilapidated condition, and their villages remind one of the abomination of desolation spoken of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... The shambling barn man, summoned gruffly by McAlpin, hesitated as he appeared at the office door and seemed to regard the situation with suspicion. He looked at de Spain tentatively, as if ready either for the discharge with ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... hand of the general to shut a door which opened into another apartment, the President shoved an armchair towards him and sank somewhat wearily into another before the desk. But only for a moment; the long shambling limbs did not seem to adjust themselves easily to the chair; the high narrow shoulders drooped to find a more comfortable lounging attitude, shifted from side to side, and the long legs moved dispersedly. Yet the face that was turned towards ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... carcasses, the living deaths—women, blasted by disease and drink till their shame brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags, wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling like apes, dying with every step they took and each breath they drew. And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss plump, in one swift fall. ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... we advanced at a shambling gallop, the horsemen gaining on us every moment. Now I thought that all was over, especially when of a sudden from behind the White Rock emerged ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Colonel, who was all himself again now that the hour for action had arrived. "I wish to Heaven I could see Tippy Tilly or any of his friends. Now is the time for them to help us." He watched the mad stream of fugitives as they flew past upon their shambling, squattering, loose-jointed beasts, but the black face of the Egyptian ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... what was coming. I tried to be the old Egbert Craddock Cummins of shambling gait and stammering sincerity, whom she loved, but I felt even as I did so that I was a new thing, a thing of surging emotions and mysterious fixity—like no human being that ever lived, except upon the stage. "Egbert," she ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... beings who are only happy when they have merged their individuality in another's and joined their fate to his. He attached himself to John from the first, and as often as he was at liberty he was hanging about him, ready to fetch and carry in his shambling gait, which was like the roll of an old dog. The expression of his beardless face was that of a boy, and he had no conversation, for he always agreed with everything that ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... A shambling man, almost a hobbledehoy, of about twenty five, ran out to obey the command, and, when he returned from No. 6, informed Wilkinson civilly that the water was in his room. Something in his homely but pleasant face, in his shock head and in his voice, seemed ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... nostrils large, his ears sharply pointed and lively, while the white rings around his eyes hinted at a cross, somewhere in his pedigree, with Arabian blood. A huge, bony, homely-looking horse he was as he drew the deacon and Miranda into the village on market days and Sundays, with a loose, shambling gait, making altogether an appearance so homely and peculiar that the smart village chaps, riding along in their jaunty turn-outs, used to chaff the good deacon on the character of the steed, and satirically challenge him to a brush. The deacon always took the ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... to their stable. All through the streets they had passed men in one uniform or another, who looked stout and well-fed, who strode in the middle of the pavement, while the Poles, whose clothes were poor and threadbare, shuffled aside in their patched and shambling boots to make way for the conqueror. Sometimes they would turn and look back at some sword-bearer who was more offensive than usual, with reflective eyes as if marking him in order to know him at a future time. As is always the case, it was the smaller ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... later, and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which, once for all, I must own ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... drooped more and more under its tree of horns, and the shambling trot grew weak and weaker. He took to standing for long periods, with nose to the ground and dejected ears dropped limply; and Buck found more time in which to get water for himself and in which to rest. At such moments, panting with red lolling tongue and with eyes fixed ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... date, 1576, Perez was really the friend of Escovedo. But Escovedo would not be advised; he wrote an impatient memorial to the King, denouncing his stitchless policy (descosido), his dilatory, shambling, idealess proceedings. So, at least, Sir William Stirling-Maxwell asserts in his Don John of Austria: 'the word used by Escovedo was descosido, "unstitched."' But Mr. Froude says that Philip used the expression, later, in reference ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... or even impolite, just to show us his humanity. But no, he is always grave, earnest, dignified, and rebukingly handsome. The college "grind" with bulging forehead, round shoulders, myopic vision and shambling gait is well known in every college, and serves as the butt of innumerable practical jokes. But no one took liberties with Emanuel Swedenborg either in boyhood or in after-life. His countenance was stern, yet not forbidding; his form tall, manly and muscular, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... an hotel in this place, which, like all hotels in America, had its large dining-room for the public table. It was an odd, shambling, low-roofed out-house, half-cowshed and half- kitchen, with a coarse brown canvas table-cloth, and tin sconces stuck against the walls, to hold candles at supper-time. The horseman had gone forward ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... time a night-prowling fiacre ambled up and veered over to his hail. He viewed this stroke of good-fortune with intense disgust: the shambling, weather-beaten animal between the shafts promised a long, damp ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... bunch of keys, and made his way to the shed, Riglett shambling behind at an interval ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... hairless travesty of a coyote move out of a draw and halt directly in the path of the mad coyote. Cripp stood there grinning till he felt the other's teeth score his unprotected hide; then he whirled and snapped back at him. The mad coyote kept straight on and Cripp followed at his own queer shambling gait. He drew close and ran alongside, and for a hundred yards they exchanged slashes in a senseless sort of way. Breed could see the blood oozing from the fur of the mad coyote's neck, and the blobs of white foam sliding down Cripp's shiny hide. Then the mad coyote fell ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... surlily back, draining his thick cup of coffee and shambling out, chewing a toothpick. At the door he looked back with his lips pulled down, mouthing a ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... thoughts were passing through her mind she happened to glance out of the window. Nutty was shambling through the garden with his pail, a bowed, shuffling pillar of gloom. As Elizabeth watched, he dropped the pail and lashed the air violently for a while. From her knowledge of bees ('It is needful to remember that bees resent ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... and with a knowing look at Rust, and a shambling bow to the girl, he went out, and seated himself on a chair in the hall, having taken the precaution to send his companion to keep an eye on the windows, which were within ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... gangling cattle-man with drooping grizzled mustache, came shambling up to the steps. His weather-beaten chaps were much too short for his lengthy limbs, the collar of his faded flannel shirt lacked an inch of meeting at the throat, its sleeves were shrunken until his hairy hands hung down ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... not hear the soldier's key turn in the lock, but soon he heard it and his heart pumped. He glanced at White, but the gray figure, flattened against the wall, never moved. The door swung open and the soldier, merely a shambling peon, bearing the tray, entered. Behind him according to custom came the second man who stood in the doorway, leaning upon his musket. But he stood there only an instant. A pair of long, powerful arms which must have seemed to him at that ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... seemed to recall a first impression of the boy at the time when he emerged from the drug store after his unprofitable effort to telephone Cecelia Brooke, an indefinite memory of a shambling figure with nose flattened against the druggist's window, apparently fascinated by the display of a ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... sharp cry and a jump. A bear on its hind legs, slow, shambling, rolling its loose shoulders, was stretching a paw towards him. The bear dropped heavily on four paws again, and a laugh came from ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... fell on as miserable a looking wretch as ever hid himself from the eyes of day—dirty, ragged, bloated, forlorn, with scarcely a trace of manhood in his swollen and disfigured face. His steps, quick from excitement a few moments before, were now shambling and made with difficulty. He had not far to walk for what he was seeking. The ministers to his appetite were all about him, a dozen in every block of that terrible district that seemed as if forsaken by God and man. Into ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... within me to say. I doubt if you now dine there "off the joint" in the "coffee-room"; more probably you have a table d'hote meal served you "at separate tables," by a German lad just beginning to ignore English. The shambling elderly waiter who was part of the furniture in 1861 is very likely dead; and for the credit of our country I hope that the recreant American whom I heard telling an Englishman there in those disheartening ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... trifle over six feet in height, with yellowish, sandy hair, high cheek bones, a rough and mottled skin, a high but narrow forehead, a pair of eyes somewhat like those of a ferret, long, ungainly limbs, and a shambling walk. A coat of rusty black, with very long tails, magnified his apparent height, and nothing that he ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... Bunsby,[141] with a head too ponderous to lay-to, and so falling victim to the inveterate MacStinger; good-hearted, modest, considerate Toots, whose brains rapidly go as his whiskers come, but who yet gets back from contact with the world, in his shambling way, some fragments of the sense pumped out of him by the forcing Blimbers; breathless Susan Nipper, beaming Polly Toodle, the plaintive Wickham, and the awful Pipchin, each with her duty in the starched Dombey household ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... sang to any one who would listen to him. I say that he sang—I mean, of course, that he spoke his verses; it was a minstrel's simple improvisation. But there are people in the villages of southern France who still recall that ungainly, shambling figure. He had grown a beard; it crinkled thickly, hiding his mouth and chin. He laughed a great deal. He was not altogether clean. And he slept wherever he could find a bed—in farmhouses, cheap hotels, haylofts, stables, open fields. Waram's few hundred pounds ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... who knows what might have grown up under a great Byzantine culture? The farms were solidly built houses with great well-filled yards, surrounded by high and defensible walls. We came into stations where long shambling youths, dressed in badly made European clothes, lounged and ogled the girls in "this style, ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... last hour by the graceful sympathy of troops of friends; but the State-protected vice has such a withering effect that it scorches up friendship as a fiery breath from a furnace might scorch a grass blade. If one of my joyous, delightful lads could just watch the shambling, dirty figure of such a failure as I have described; if he could see the sneers of amused passers-by, the timid glances of women, the contemptuous off-hand speech of the children—"Oh! him! That's old, boozy ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... with attention. A singularly powerful man, not so tall as Kenelm by some inches, but still above the middle height, herculean shoulders and chest, the lower limbs not in equal proportion,—a sort of slouching, shambling gait. As he advanced the moonlight fell on his face; it was a handsome one. He wore no hat, and his hair, of a light brown, curled close. His face was fresh-coloured, with aquiline features; his age apparently about six ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... changed though he was. He wore a fashionable wig, and his clothes fitted well a figure that, once shambling and loose-jointed, had now all the erectness of the soldier, but the face ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... witches, that made Detroit feared by the early settlers, none were more dreaded than the Nain Rouge (Red Dwarf), or Demon of the Strait, for it appeared only when there was to be trouble. In that it delighted. It was a shambling, red-faced creature, with a cold, glittering eye and teeth protruding from a grinning mouth. Cadillac, founder of Detroit, having struck at it, presently lost his seigniory and his fortunes. It was seen scampering ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... time for an early breakfast when we arrived at this hotel, and the quaintest coloured gentlemen waited on us; they were rather aged, and had a shambling way of dragging their feet, but the most sympathetic manners, just suited to the four honeymoon pairs who were seated at little tables round. That was a curious coincidence, wasn't it, Mamma, to find four pairs in one hotel in that state. None of the bridegrooms were over twenty-five, ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... bugles, the mutter and roar of the artillery, came the Yell. Their shambling trot quickened. Men were running now, forming a great wave to lick up at the breastworks. Men in that line did not know—or care—that they were moving without the promised support on right and left; they did not hear the disturbed orders of the officers still striving to slow them, to wrench them ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... them nearer to the light of the upper air. At other times he could do little more than follow with his eye the tall figure of Nathan, plunging from shadow to shadow, and knoll to knoll, with a pace both free and rapid, and little resembling the shambling, hesitating step with which he moved among the haunts of his contemners and oppressors. As for the dog, little Peter, he was only with difficulty seen when ascending some such illuminated knoll as has been mentioned, when he might ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... the animals being lost to their owners; but such is rarely to be apprehended, except in the case of some incorrigible beasts who are not to be trusted. We certainly have known horses, so hobbled, make off in a sort of shambling gallop, by drawing up the two confined feet together, and progressing in short leaps; but, in general, a horse so turned out at night, after a day's hard ride, has a sort of tacit understanding with his master that he is ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... other as they obeyed; and a heavy, shambling, graceless man, dressed in the most exaggerated fopperies of the day, but with a face which even sickliness, that refines most faces, could not divest of the most vacant dulness, and a mien and gait to which no attire could give dignity, passed through the group, bowing awkwardly ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... terrible going it had been the last few days! Soft slush, in which the snow-shoes sink helplessly. The bear had come from the west right up to the Fram, had stopped and inspected the work that was going on, had then retreated a little, made a considerable detour, and set off eastward at its easy, shambling gait, without deigning to pay any further attention to such a trifle as a ship. It had rummaged about in every hole and corner where there seemed to be any chance of finding food, and had rooted in the snow after anything ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... it had a range of about a hundred feet. Over the muffled heavy silence of the blood-red day the cripple's curse floated clear. He lowered his weapon; and, heedless that we also might be armed, he leaped nimbly past Mary's prostrate form and came shambling over the rocks ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... Collins; and the reply was followed by the shuffling sound of several pairs of feet, the owners of which came shambling into the room the next moment, with naked cutlasses in their hands, while one of them carried, in addition, a length of some three or ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... "damsel"; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sarah Barmby, who lived in one of those little shabby villas on the London road and looked after her father. She moved about the villa in an unseeing, shambling way, hitting herself against the furniture. Her face was heavy with a gentle, brooding goodness, and she had little eyes that blinked and twinkled in the heaviness, as if something amused her. At first you kept on wondering what the joke was, till you saw it was only a habit Sarah had. ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... thin as I am fat, and his clothes hang on him in the most comical way. He is very tall and shambling, wears a ragged beard and a broad Stetson hat, and suffers amazingly from hay fever in the autumn. (In fact, his essay on "Hay Fever" is the best thing he ever wrote, I think.) As he came striding up the ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... one all-prevalent truth in normal existence is jealously to exclude it from his book.... For "living" is to be conscious of an incessant series of less than momentary sensations, of about equal poignancy, for the most part, and of nearly equal unimportance. Art attempts to marshal the shambling procession into trimness, to usurp the role of memory and convention in assigning to some of these sensations an especial prominence, and, in the old phrase, to lend perspective to the forest we cannot see because of the trees. ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... have a shambling sort of gait, half walk, half amble, but manage to get over the ground very quickly, and for such cumbersome animals are very nimble-footed. It is almost ludicrous to see the huge beasts picking their way along a narrow "bund" or crossing some ditch by a bridge of fallen logs, but ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... noise, wilt'a?" said Michael, roughly, as he passed near him, and threatening him with his fist. Susan's back was turned to the pair. The expression of Willie's face changed from vacancy to fear, and he came shambling up to Susan, who put her arm round him, and, as if protected by that shelter, he began making faces at Michael. Susan saw what was going on, and, as if now first struck by the strangeness of her brother's manner, she looked anxiously at Michael for an explanation. Michael ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... brain of a drowning man; that same crowded my brain during the few moments which swung in to us Daniel, scowling, masterful, his raw bulk and his long shambling stride ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... helmet. His aim in life is to gain possession of the helmet, the ring, and the treasure, and through them to obtain that Plutonic mastery of the world under the beginnings of which he himself writhed during Alberic's brief reign. Mimmy is a blinking, shambling, ancient creature, too weak and timid to dream of taking arms himself to despoil Fafnir, who still, transformed to a monstrous serpent, broods on the gold in a hole in the rocks. Mimmy needs the help of a hero for that; and he has craft enough to know that it is quite possible, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... expected to go striding through miles of alder swamp and dark spruce woods, fleeing the hated world of men and bondage, before setting himself to get acquainted with his new followers. His high-strung temper was badly jarred. He drew off, shaking his vast antlers, and went shambling with spacious stride down along the barrier towards the brook. The four cows, in single file, hurried after him anxiously, afraid he might ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... was gone; they heard him slipping and shambling on the polished oak of the stairs. Nancy screamed when there came the sound of a heavy fall. ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... A quick step, yet shambling, came along the lobby. There was a pause, as of one gathering heart for a venture; then a clumsy ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... follows the conversion of wheat fields and grazing land into vineyards and orchards. Not even Riverside can compare with it in the rapid evolution of a great source of wealth which ten years ago was almost unknown. What has transformed Fresno from a shambling, dirty resort of cowboys and wheat ranchers into one of the prettiest cities in California is the raisin grape. Though nearly all fruits may be grown here, yet this is pre-eminently the home of the raisin ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... again, and the shambling lad felt dimly as if the scent of the sandalwood were sweeter, and the lamp-flame clearer. But the stranger's ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... more, planting might in his heart, to call an assembly of the long-haired Achaeans and speak out to all the wooers who slaughter continually the sheep of his thronging flocks, and his kine with trailing feet and shambling gait. And I will guide him to Sparta and to sandy Pylos to seek tidings of his dear father's return, if peradventure he may hear thereof and that so he may be had in ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... ten o'clock, they buried Saunders on a certain little knoll among the sagebrush; buried him without much ceremony, it is true, but with more respect than he had received when he was alive and shambling sneakily among them. Good Indian was there, saying little and listening attentively to the comments made upon the subject, and when the last bit of yellow gravel had been spatted into place he rode down through the Indian ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... will not readily admit within the charmed circle of "literature," really constitutes a bridge spanning the gulf between the severer classical style and the colloquial; while an elegant terseness characterises the higher-class novel, there are others in which the style is loose and shambling. Still, it remains true that no book of any first-rate literary pretensions would be easily intelligible to any class of Chinamen, educated or otherwise, if read aloud exactly as printed. The public reader of stories is obliged to translate, so to speak, into the colloquial ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... meagre, mean-visaged, muddy complexioned, and altogether a man of no account—quite insignificant in the eyes of all who looked upon him. If there were one opinion in which the few who had taken the trouble to think of the puny, somewhat shambling stranger from Burgundy at all coincided, it was that he was inoffensive but quite incapable of any important business. He seemed well educated, claimed to be of respectable parentage and had considerable facility of speech, when any person could be found who thought ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of talking, awkward and vacant-looking; he was excessively fond of drink, and never could sit still long; in walking he shambled along, and rolled from side to side; and yet he got over fifty miles in the day with his rolling, shambling gait. He exposed himself to the most varied adventures: spent the night in the marshes, in trees, on roofs, or under bridges; more than once he had got shut up in lofts, cellars, or barns; he sometimes lost his gun, his dog, his most indispensable garments; got ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... waving plumes, and their silver spurs glittered in the sun. Then came the angel-monarch in rich attire surrounded by his counselors and the flower of his knights. The men-at-arms and servants brought up the rear of the procession, and among them, on a shambling piebald steed, his ape perched behind him and his cloak of foxtails flapping in the wind, rode the jester-king—a strange sight which caused unbounded merriment in all the country towns through which the ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... his wine hath spilt As Scorpions smote him treblefold, Is thrown into a stagnant sea By Lordly Helm of bad repute, Whose visage, curl'd in ughly mien, Vext at each leper's font of spleen, Invokes a hairless witch to scan The shambling hordes that boon refute, Who lifts her unguis, long and lean, To curse each vyper's bloody dream, Each mongrel and forsaken man. Then quivers that cippus' hurl'd As templed vaults are splinter'd wide; And fearful fancies cleave the ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... academy. I like our fellows to look well, upright, gentlemanlike. There is Master Fielding—he with the black eye. What a magnificent build of a boy! There is Master Scott, one of the heads of the school. Did you ever see the fellow more hearty and manly? Yonder lean, shambling, cadaverous lad, who is always borrowing money, telling lies, leering after the house-maids, is Master Laurence Sterne—a bishop's grandson, and himself intended for the Church; for shame, you little reprobate! But what a genius the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The Bear "receives idolatrous veneration," says another. They "worship it after their fashion," says a third. Have we another case of "the heathen in his blindness"? Only here he "bows down" not to "gods of wood and stone," but to a live thing, uncouth, shambling but ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... and went forward with shambling steps and shaking limbs. Oscarovitch closed the port with hands which all his force could not keep steady, and betook himself to bed, to lie awake for the rest of the short summer night wondering vainly what really ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... one of our big factory towns and look at the mill-hands coming home in droves after a day's work, young girls and old women, boys and men, all fluffed over with cotton, and so dead tired that they can hardly walk. They come shambling along with all the individuality ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... me his hand for parting. I took it, and we said, together, "Well, good-by," and moved in different directions. I knew very well that I should turn back, and I had not gone a hundred feet away when I faced about. He was shambling off into the dusk, a most hapless figure. ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... yards behind, and was consequently unable to overhear the conversation. He went shambling along, half whimpering and not unfrequently invoking the God of Israel; but every now and then a cunning light gleamed from his eyes, and his lips became compressed with a ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... sufficient firmness to ascend. Paul, being the lightest, helped by his companions, had got up some way, when a gruff shout made them turn round, and old Charcoal, as they called the black, was seen shambling along on his crutches towards them. He beckoned Paul to come down from the tree in a way which showed that he would not be disobeyed. They saw that he had a basket on his back, and, pointing to the fountain to intimate that he wanted water, he set about turning its contents, ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... Elizabeth, and James, and all good royal folks had always done; and lo! he must lose his head for it. His was altogether a more gentlemanly and respectable performance than that of Henry, not wanting in a sort of ideal magnificence, which his brutal predecessor, or even his shambling old father never dreamed of. But so it is; it is not always on those who are sinners above all men that the tower of Siloam falls, but only on those who happen to be under it when its time comes. So I intend to cherish a little partiality for gentlemanly, magnificent ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier, You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace, Broad for the self-complacent British sneer, His length of shambling limb, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... their canvas sides make themselves conspicuous, and so do the bakers' carts; while light and neat American wagonettes glide rapidly along among less attractive vehicles. Now and then a Chinaman passes, with his peculiar shambling gait, with a pole across his shoulders balancing his baskets of "truck"; women with oranges and bananas for a penny apiece meet one at every corner, and still the sidewalks are so broad, and the ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... heads together and whispered and planned and discussed. Then they brought forth this sufficiently shambling conclusion—but it was the best they could do, in so close a place: they said the Pope was so far away; and it was not necessary to go to him anyway, because the present judges had sufficient power and authority to deal with the present case, and were in effect ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his last wish, Jean Ramel had been conveyed to the Pantheon in the wretched paupers' hearse, which conveys them to the common grave at the shambling trot of some ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... an Indian bent his bow against a bear shambling across a little sunny glade. The arrow did its errand, and where the creature fell, there we sat down and feasted beside a fire kindled by rubbing two sticks together. According to their wont the Indians ate ravenously, and when the meal was ended began to smoke, each warrior ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... for campaigning. Streams and springs were numerous, and there were fine sites for camps. The deserted toll-houses along the way glowered mournfully through the rent windows, and I fancied them, sometimes, as I rode at night, haunted by the shambling tollman. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... cunning about them. The eyes were wild, and perhaps fierce, but they were honest and frank still. The clothes were much worn and torn, but the body they covered was strong and shapely. There was nothing weak or shambling in those ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... inquiry at Williamstown I find that none of the professors at Williams saw an encouraging gleam of aptitude for anything in the big-eyed, shambling youth whom Mr. Tufts had assiduously coached to meet the requirements of matriculation. There is a shadowy tradition that he did fairly well in his Latin themes when the subject suited his fancy, but his fancy more often led him to a sporting resort, kept by an ex-pugilist named Pettit, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... shock-headed, shambling, awkward lad with an uncommonly wide mouth, very red cheeks, a turned-up nose, and certainly the most comical expression of face I ever saw. He stopped short at the door on seeing a stranger, twirled in his ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... offence intended in his badly huddled nudes; he only delineates in simple, naked fashion the horrors of some undressed humans. His landscapes are primitive though suffused by perceptible atmosphere; while the rough architecture, shambling figures, harsh colouring do not quite destroy the impression of general vitality. You could not say with Walt Whitman that his stunted trees were "uttering joyous leaves of dark green." They utter, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the squatters that said something sharp to him one day in a way that showed us boys that he thought himself as good as he was. And he stood up straight and looked him in the face, till we hardly could think he was the same man that was so bent and shambling and broken-down-looking most times. He used to live in a little hut in the township all by himself. It was just big enough to hold him and us at our lessons. He had his dinner at the inn, along with Mr. and Mrs. ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... first, the Mistress had been Bruce's champion at The Place. There was no competition for that office. She and she alone could see any promise in the shambling youngster. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... the bonfire burned brighter, lighting up the scene—the shambling stores around the jail on the public square, the better citizens making appeals in vain for law and order, the shouting, fool-hardy mob, waiting for Richard Travis to say the word, and he sitting among them pale, and terribly silent with ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... a lad, "Foolish Joe" people called him, and he was, as usual, accompanied by a little band of fun-loving, teasing boys. In a moment they were gone; but the shambling central figure with its vacant face stayed with her to accentuate her distress. She leaned her head upon her arm, but she could ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... stillness of the Strand. An occasional halt at a shop-window was sufficient to assure him that the watcher of the Temple was still on his heels. The man, he was interested to see, played his part very unobtrusively, shambling along in nonchalant fashion, mostly hugging the sides of the houses, ready to dart out of sight into a doorway or down a side turning, should he by any mischance arrive too close on the heels ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... would have declined if only they could have thought of the proper method of doing so. As it was, they only succeeded in shambling through the parsonage door, instinctively concealing their half-smoked ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... He found, back of the blacksmith shop, the wreck of an old cart which years ago had been used for breaking colts; he improvised shafts and seat; he discovered the encouraging fact that Old Bots, a shambling derelict who had lost an eye when Wayne Shandon was quite young, was gentle and trustworthy. After that, wherever he went abroad, and he travelled all over the countryside, he rode in the cart, steering Old Bots this way and that with much shouting, prodding ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... strange-looking beast. It has a big head and a heavy shaggy mane. The hind part of its body is much lower than its shoulders, and its hind-legs are short. This odd formation gives it an awkward shambling manner of walking, which is ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... shape means ugliness. (10) The stiff-limbed dog will come home limping from the hunting-field; (11) just as want of strength and thinness of coat go hand in hand with incapacity for toil. (12) The lanky-legged, unsymmetrical dog, with his shambling gait and ill-compacted frame, ranges heavily; while the spiritless animal will leave his work to skulk off out of the sun into shade and lie down. Want of nose means scenting the hare with difficulty, ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... The shambling mountaineer stretched himself to his lean length of six feet two, and wagged an incredulous head. Out of pale eyes he studied the man before him until the newcomer from "down-below" felt that, in the attitude, lay almost the ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... without a word, holding the trim silver mounted umbrella, and I mechanically brought up the rear. It had all happened so quickly that I too was confused. The scanty populace in the rain-filled street stared and gaped. A shambling fellow in corduroys bawled an obscene jest. Pasquale put down ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... through a year for promised recompense, and he laid on us his commands. I round their city built the Trojans a wall, wide and most fair, that the city might be unstormed, and thou Phoebus, didst herd shambling crook-horned kine among the spurs of woody many-folded Ida. But when the joyous seasons were accomplishing the term of hire, then redoubtable Laomedon robbed us of all hire, and sent us off with threats. He threatened that he would bind together our feet and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... rivulet, I had placed a cup to collect the slow and tepid drops that were all now coming down the reed for Heru. And as I went back each time with that sickly spoonful at the bottom of the vessel all the dying beasts lifted their heads and watched—the thirsty wolves shambling after me; the boars half sat up and grunted plaintively; the panthers, too weak to rise, beat the dusty ground with their tails; and from the portico the blue storks, with trailing wings, croaked ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... murderer!' and he sprang forward to throw himself on the shaking, shambling wretch. Mosk eluded him, but uttered a squeaking cry like the shriek of a hunted hare in the jaws of the greyhound. The next instant the room seemed to swarm with men, and the bishop as in a dream heard the merciless formula of ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... moment there came a stir from the room beyond, the tap-tap of a cane and shuffling steps across the polished parquet. Dysart's grip relaxed, his hand fell away, and he made a ghastly grimace as a little old gentleman came half-trotting, half-shambling to the doorway. He was small and dapper and pink-skinned under his wig; the pink was paint; his lips and eyes peered and simpered; from one bird-claw hand dangled ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Oswald," said the Earl. And then Lord Brentford did make something of a shambling speech, in which he expressed a hope that they two might for the future live together on friendly terms, forgetting the past. He ought to have been prepared for the occasion, and the speech was poor ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... stone demijohn was almost the only tangible reminder there was left of the Bolton who had gone before. There were a few in the village who wondered how, in the three intervening years, the big silent, shambling boy had managed to tear from his acres money enough to clear the place of its debt—the biggest thing by far in his heritage. Eight hundred dollars was a large sum in Boltonwood—and Denny's acres were mostly rocks. Old Denny would have sold the last scythe and fork in the dilapidated ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... was at her usual place on the edge of the precipice that looked down upon the deep, divided channels of the great river. She turned on hearing the deep breathing of Pepin and the shambling of Antoine as they passed over some loose gravel behind her. She rose to her feet with a little cry of welcome. There was something in the dwarfs face that spoke of a settled purpose and hope. Their late awkward meeting ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... they turned through, dragging their awkwardly shambling burden. As they gained the front porch the front door was flung wide, and Mrs. Adams stood there, peering out, to find what was the meaning of this scuffling and grunting. Charley was glad to see her, framed ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... slight incline into the village, our miserable ponies commenced a shambling trot, the noise of which brought numerous idlers to the inn-door to inquire the news. This inn was a rambling, unpainted erection of wood, opposite to a "cash, credit, and barter store," kept by an enterprising Caledonian—an additional proof of the saying which ascribes ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... go and see," she said, and hurried from the room, Aunt Phillis shambling after her ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... short or long. He does it; how I don't know. He alters the shape of his nose, his cheeks, and his chin. I suppose that he pads them out with little rubber insets. He alters his voice, and his figure, and even his height. He can be stiff and upright like a drilled soldier, or loose-jointed and shambling like a tramp. He is a finished artist, and employs the very simplest means. He could, I truly believe, deceive his wife or his mother, but he will never again deceive me. I am not a specially observant man; still one can make a shot at most things when driven to it, and I object ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... Yorke, seated together at one end of the table, arose as Gully entered. Standing curiously still, as if carved in stone, their bitter eyes alone betraying their emotions, silently they gazed at the huge, gaunt, unkempt figure that came shambling towards them. ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... and looked over the hedge and saw the chickweed and the thistles in undisputed possession. For David has gone. "It will take a long time to turn him into a soldier," we said when we saw him leave his thatched roof last spring to join up, and watched him shambling down the lane to the valley and the distant station. "The war will be over before he gets into the trenches," I said cheerfully to his wife, his mother, and Aunt Jane as they sat later in the day mingling their tears in the "parlour"—that apartment sacred to Sundays, ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... unsteadily on his heel and left her. The shadows among the gravestones down hill laid hands on his broken, shambling figure, and he became a shadow. Once the shadow stumbled. And as if that distant, awkward act had aroused Mary from a kind of lethargy, she broke forward a step, reaching ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Cold and dark as mid-winter. I shall send with this two new photographs of myself for your opinion. My father regards this life "as a shambling sort of omnibus which is taking him to his hotel." Is that not well said? It came out in a rather pleasant and entirely amicable discussion which we had this afternoon on a walk. The colouring of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thought I, as the three great animals wheeled in their tracks, and went away like lightning. What was strange to us, they did not gallop, as most deer do, but went off in a sort of shambling trot, like a 'pacing' horse, and quite as fast as a horse ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... answer, for her heart was breaking, but turned and went into her room. Burrell had an irresistible desire to tell Gale that he wanted his daughter for his wife; it would be an unwonted pleasure to startle this iron-gray old man and the shawled and shambling mummy of red, with the unwinking eyes that always reminded him of two ox-heart cherries; but he had given Necia his promise. So he descended to the exchange of ordinary topics, and inquired for news ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... one of them spoke: "Come, Bob, let's go over and see if we can't tuck away some of that grub." So both turned their backs upon the train, and upon me; and as they went over to see if they couldn't "tuck away some of that grub," I got a view of their heavy shoulders, and their shambling, awkward gait. A pair of old draft horses, going out in the morning to take their places in front of their truck, would not move more stiffly than those ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... and began to explain in a rather shambling fashion that he had been there some time and "intended to hunt him up, of course"; but he had "been so taken up with business," ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... whatever description should be molested." As the fields in places were enclosed by rail fences, it was strictly against orders to disturb any of the fences. This order had been religiously obeyed all the while, until this night on the top of the Blue Ridge. A shambling, tumble-down rail fence was near the camp of the Third South Carolina, not around any field, however, but apparently to prevent stock from passing on the western side of the mountain. At night while the troops lay in the open air, without any protection whatever, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... "I would not disturb you like this unless—steady there, for Heaven's sake Professor, don't kick till you've heard me out!" For, the mule, in a clumsy, shambling way which betrayed the novice, was slowly revolving on his own axis so as to bring his hind-quarters into action, while still keeping his only serviceable eye upon his ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... upon the proprietor of the donkey-cart, for it had caused him to 'eat all his economies,' and he resigned himself to the wages of a road-mender, which were small but sure. It was getting dusk when we parted. My next companion on the road was a poor bent-backed, shambling, idiotic youth, who was driving home two long-tailed sheep and a lamb, and who had just enough intelligence for this work. He kept at my side for a mile or two, flourishing a long stick over the backs of the sheep and uttering melancholy cries. His presence ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... to this Mullins grumbled out something intended as a negative, and, shambling across the room, placed himself in a corner, as far as possible from Oaklands, where he sat rubbing his knees, the very image of sulkiness and terror. Cumberland, who appeared during the whole course of the affair absorbed in a book, though, in fact, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... late. Already he was on his way towards them, shambling rather than walking down the room, an unwholesome, unattractive, even repulsive figure. He seemed to have shrunken in size since his arrival in England, and his brother's clothes, always too large, hung ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pulling at the wooden pin transfixing his throat just under the mandible-equipped jaw, holding his head at an unnatural angle. Without seeming to notice the others of his kind, the Throg came on at a shambling run, straight at Shann as if he could actually see through the dark and had marked down the Terran for personal vengeance. There was something so uncanny about that forward dash that Shann retreated. As his hand ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... 21 stood at that particular corner he could not exactly say, but he thinks it must have been three or four minutes before he noticed a suspicious-looking individual shambling along under the shadow of the garden walls. He was working his way cautiously in the direction of the cul-de-sac, and D 21, also keeping well within the shadow, went ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... said, however, and he could not recall them. He had no time to speak of anything, or to think of what course they should now pursue. Coming straight toward the tree with an awkward, shambling, but speedy gait withal, the monster would soon reach the spot where they stood. Its movements showed it to be in a state of excitement—the natural consequence of its late conflict with the crocodile. If seen, they would come in for a share of its ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... house door slouched a year-old hound puppy with shambling feet and lean ribs. It stood for a moment, whining and wagging a disconsolate tail at the woman's feet, then came suddenly to life and charged a razor-back hog that was rooting at will in what should have been a ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... house, professedly a Christian. He began to tamper with the wall. First a tiny little bit of stone taken out that did not show the daylight through; then a little bigger, and a bigger. And the serpent struck its fangs into him, and if you saw him now, he is a shambling wreck, outside of society, and, as we sometimes tremblingly think, beyond hope. Young men! 'whoso breaketh an hedge, a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... small and shambling German, whose head had a long white cap upon it, rendering more filthy his dull complexion, and upon whose feet the chains clanked as he slowly advanced, preceded by two officers, flanked by a Lutheran clergyman, and followed, as his ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... to the old dark manor-house upon the side of the hill a youth had been riding. His mount was a sorry one, a weedy, shambling, long-haired colt, and his patched tunic of faded purple with stained leather belt presented no very smart appearance; yet in the bearing of the man, in the poise of his head, in his easy graceful carriage, and in the bold glance ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle |
